Then he disappeared again into the shadows of the room, but António Ferraz still heard him add a useless bit of advice: “Rest there until daybreak, Commander. I’ll take watch on my own.”
The commander lit one more cigarette, even though he knew from the depths of his being that not even the sweet pull of menthol would be sufficient to drive away the ghosts of the past, much less the certainty of what would happen in the first few minutes of the morning. He passed the next hours trying in vain to invite sleep, but at every moment he was disturbed by the invisible noises of the jungle, by the distant thunder of the sky, by the guffaws and chatter of Inácio Montenegro and Zeca Baião. At three in the morning, he saw a wild dog in the shadows between the disconnected television and the wall, and a little while afterwards he heard very clearly the voice of the prisoner declaiming the salty stanzas of Arlindo Barbeitos to the clouds of the plateau. He was at the point of accompanying him in reciting those final lines, but he considered that doing so would be as if acknowledging defeat to the traumatic memory of that remote day. He got up and shouted:
“All of you stay there in the middle of the war. This time I’m deserting earlier.”
He walked through the apartment as if he didn’t know where he was, trying to find an exit from that old Angola, but quickly he realized that the doors were closed forever until the next morning. So he advanced to the door of the privy, where the prisoner was locked in and taking courage in the words of the poet. He had decided to knock down the door to let the man who had already died long ago run away, so he wouldn’t have to kill him again. It was in this agitated state that Captain Elias Vieira found him and wrapped him in his arms, urging him to calm himself and to get some sleep, while he answered from the depths of his exasperation that that’s what he most wanted, but that the bullet he had to shoot in a few hours didn’t let him. And the captain led him cautiously in the dark, between the boulders of the plateau and the English furniture he had inherited from his uncle, until he was back in the armchair, and he passed the bottle of cane liquor that kept him company on the nights he was on watch, so he could recover from his torment. The commander drank without protest and felt the same slow burn down his esophagus as in the old times. Then he said again:
“Leave me alone, Comrade. Please.”
The captain nodded an acknowledgement, got up, and limped away into the dark.
“I’ll come wake you when it’s time,” he said before disappearing into smoke.
António Ferraz remained immobile in the armchair in the African night of his apartment, struggling against that dizzying disturbance.
He was still in the same position without having rested when around six in the morning Captain Elias Vieira appeared in front of him with a mug of coffee and a piece of dry bread. He took a tiny bite of the bread and two sips of coffee and afterwards, inconsolable, threw the rest to the earthen floor. When he passed the empty mug to the captain, the officer handed him the revolver, the same one they had given him in the Soviet capital, holding it with two open hands as if it were a military relic. He saw the weapon and became frightened. But even so, he took it and placed it on his lap.
“It’s time, Commander,” declared the captain.
He looked at his old friend, lacking the strength to continue resisting that relentless duplication of destiny, and he rose with the revolver hanging in his hand.
“Let’s go,” he said. And he advanced in the dark, followed by the Captain.
Zeca Baião was waiting for them at the privy door, still dazed by the early hour, his posture expressing a certain solemnity. As soon as he saw him, the commander divested him of his illusions.
“Don’t bother trying to look like a minister of state,” he said. “What will happen here is for the hyenas. Open the door, comrade.”
The soldier said nothing, lowered his gaze and took the rusty key out of his pocket that he then used to open the lock. Inside, the darkness was even denser and the presence of the prisoner was barely distinguishable from the voice whispering the Barbeitos verses to the tiles. Zeca Baião came in. A few seconds later he came out with a six-foot-tall black man, his hands tied and his forehead bloody. Nobody said anything and Captain Elias Vieira made a signal for them to follow him, at the very moment that the first rays of the sun started to fill the plateau. They walked about thirty meters and stopped. The captain ordered the prisoner to kneel on the ground. And from this side of time, mocked from all sides by the onslaughts of his memories, Commander António Ferraz pointed his revolver at the right temple of the man and for the second time in his life killed him with a bullet of his own shame.
Afterwards, trembling, he went back to the armchair covered in blankets in his living room in Lisbon, picked up the phone and dialed his mother’s number in Coimbra. Tears began to run down his face.
TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE BY ELIZABETH LOWE
[ROMANIA]
RUXANDRA CESEREANU
Haritina
I HAD ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED by women, whom I saw as lionesses with great, piercing eyes. I was never indifferent to men, but since what I liked about men was chiefly their wisdom and sharpedged, effulgent quality, I left it to women to carry the weight of the strange, invisible, ambiguous, and slippery side of this world. I cannot say I was friendlier with women than with men, but only that, given I was the same as them, it was easier for me to perceive the undercurrents, innermost parts, and subtle tissues of women’s so special world. Women smell of oven-baked apple. Men smell of quince. Women have sharp, rending nails. Men have tidily trimmed nails. As for myself, I hoped that one day I might become a pedicurist to the angels.
Naturally, the most important woman in my life was my mother. To be more precise, it was my mother’s peerless skin, from which I brought to the surface all kinds of psychically charged stories about what it meant to be a woman. But the second magisterial woman in my life was Haritina, before even my grandmothers, aunts and cousins, they too special one and all. Because Haritina was the one who foretold that I would become a storyteller, at a time when it had never entered my head to be anything other than a poet through and through. She did not tell me this in plain words, but convolutedly and in the cant of rustic witches. For Haritina was a kind of witch and dwelled somewhere in the North, in a village close to the monasteries whose exterior walls are painted with all kinds of devils, celestial ladders, and other scenes of torment or redemption.
I met her when I was eighteen, in the summer after my first year at university, while attending a folklore studies camp. The dice had been cast and they fell in such a way that during that long, dry summer I had to dig around and find out about the art and wisdom of witches. And so, inquisitive and awkward, I began my search. It was not hard to discover Haritina, since the whole village knew of her and pointed the way. But before anything else, I was surprised by her unusual name: neither Maria nor Ana, but rather that monastically tinged name of hers. Without a doubt, Haritina came from har (divine grace), although her grace was not divine, but mischievously magical, if I may put it like that. I presented myself to Haritina one Monday, at ten o’clock in the morning. Neither the day nor the hour was suitable, for I found Haritina’s gate shut. She was very curt and did not wish to speak to me. And rightly so, for who and what was I, after all? An uppity student with a ballpoint pen and a notebook, in jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with “Pink Floyd,” hair plaited in some twenty pigtails, wearing hippy-style sunglasses and with an unlikeable, bookish face. I stood by her gate, in the hope that Haritina might relent, but the witch looked at me with such mistrust that I gave up. I came back at dusk, but I still wouldn’t have had any more success then, if my skin-tight jeans had not ridden up my hips, exposing my left ankle, on which I wore a strange piece of homemade jewelry, which I had fashioned at a rock festival not long before: an anklet made from an aluminum fork. Well, that fork bracelet around my ankle was what mollified Haritina, who, with an air of complicity, let me cross the threshold of her house. My je
ans, scrawled with the words to Pink Floyd songs, were likewise a kind of crossroads, ever yearning to guide those who saw them to the understanding that there is always a right path and a left path. The words to “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” written in ballpoint on the legs of my jeans, seemed to Haritina to be strange signs, precisely because she did not, as may be suspected, speak English. And besides, I used to mumble the words to the song almost continuously, even when I ate or slept. That was how I saw things back then; it was a kind of personal magic spell, an acoustic amulet: Remember when you were young / You shone like the sun / Shine on, you crazy diamond / Now there’s a look in your eyes / Like black holes in the sky / Shine on, you crazy diamond … And so it was that Haritina permitted me to cross her threshold that evening, and on that occasion, even if we did not speak about the things I wished to know, I tasted one of her special pies, filled with gooseberries and rhubarb, which is said to clarify the magical eyeglass through which the world can be viewed back to front. We spoke of nothing special that evening. Haritina merely told me that she would put me to the test. When I left, I only pretended to leave, for I went back and stood in wait by the kitchen window, which had remained half open: Haritina had undressed and was washing her body, and her body was covered with floral and geometric designs, the likes of which I had never seen before. I do not know what her body was painted with; I supposed that it could only be a dye derived from plants, and which in time would vanish. As for Haritina’s hair, although the witch was around forty years of age, it reached down to her hips and was bluish, for it had the tint of a frozen lake. Haritina did not live alone: she was married to the village woodsman and had a son my age, who worked in the town. But for as long as I had dealings with her, I never glimpsed either of those two men.
That night, in the hostel where we folklorist-philologists were staying, I dreamed like a madwoman; I dreamed I was wandering through the floral and geometric designs on Haritina’s body. As you might say, I dreamed a myriad of labyrinths in which I lost myself, delighting in the bare, narrow paths that loomed from my nocturnal illusions. The next day I went to her not early in the morning, but at dusk, as she had demanded. By day, Haritina worked in the village barbershop. She was a hairdresser and it wasn’t for nothing that she dealt with the hair of so many people, for she stole the life force from the shorn hair, which, along with other ingredients, she put to use in spells and cures. The second time I entered her house at dusk I saw a jar in which were stuffed a number of glossy crow’s feathers, I saw a string of bear’s teeth, ground-up pieces of quartz, dried cloves of garlic, and a music box, within which were some intricately woven bronze chains, like handcuffs, for making and unmaking the world, as Haritina whispered to me ironically. The music box surprised me most of all, since it was something that belonged in a well-off house in town, rather than in the abode of this spell-casting peasant healer woman who was known to be a witch. In any event, in that second dusk, Haritina recited a number of spells to me, which I painstakingly transcribed in my little notebook, highly satisfied with my booty. But it was all a trick.
The third dusk was to be the most trying, however, since Haritina was to check to see whether or not I was cut out to be a witch. When I arrived at her house, Haritina was busy boiling a potion of fresh walnut leaves, into which she had mixed pepper and cinnamon. She made me undress, and after the potion had cooled she anointed the whole of my body with it, including my hair. She then made me lie down on the long table in the kitchen, covering me with a sheet. I felt a bit cold and was shivering slightly. It was then that I started singing “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” I divined that I would have to do something unusual under the influence of the walnut-leaf potion with which I had been anointed. But to my misfortune or fortune—who knows which?—I did not have any vision or hallucination or illumination. I saw nothing at all, by all that is holy. Nor did I fly or journey through other spaces or leave my body. Something else entirely happened to me: my tongue loosened immoderately and I started telling stories by the dozen: stories I never knew had been lying inside me, dwelling in my pores and inner reaches, stories that belonged to none and to all, which gushed out in an unexampled torrent. That whole night I told stories, until dawn came and I fell silent. My jaw ached, my tongue was swollen, and I was hoarse. Haritina laughed softly and made me a thick tea of linden flowers and honey. You are not cut out to be a witch, she told me; that is not what you are made for. But you are a weaver of tales. That is what you are and what you will always be. It is a good thing, she added, because that means that you will be able to comfort others. A weaver of tales! I exclaimed in amazement. I thought that I was a poet and nothing but a poet. Yes, a weaver of tales, Haritina concluded.
A year later, when I met the man of my life, he asked me, in the oddest possible way, what I was: I told him all in one breath that I was a weaver of stories. Then that means there are now two of us on the same path, he replied, chuckling to himself, and gave my hair a gentle flick, as a kind of covenant known only to weavers of stories.
During all the other dusks I spent at Haritina’s house, I zealously wrote down spells for all kinds of things—illnesses, misfortunes, and joys—but never did I witness any witchcraft. As it was not in my blood to be an apprentice, Haritina walled up her witch’s skills to keep them away from me. Later, I understood that the jar of crow’s feathers, the bear’s teeth, the quartz, the garlic, and the music box had been put there just to beguile and test me. If she really was a witch, Haritina kept the secret to herself. As for the spells she dictated to me, they were real, but they were just words. Without the magic adjuncts and the witch’s special gestures, they had no effect.
For the ten days I remained in that region, I was always Haritina’s guest at dusk. And when I left, I left forever, for I never went back and never sought her out again. But it’s not seldom that I dream that I’m wandering through the labyrinths traced on her body.
In the life of every woman, as I now know, there are three “diamantine” women, as I call them. The first diamantine woman was my mother: from her I learned what the skin and touching are. The second diamantine woman in my life was Haritina, the peasant hairdresser and witch from that sun-scorched village in the North. From her I learned that I am and will be a weaver of stories. The third diamantine woman has not yet appeared, and who knows when she will cross my path, if I be lucky enough. As for me, perhaps I too will have played the role of a diamantine woman for other women like me. Perhaps my other name, Mesmaea, besides my rightful name, Ruxandra, plays this role. Might Esther, Dardina, and Sharashka (known to you, reader, from my story “Three Witches and an Apprentice”) bear witness to this? I do not know.
As I said at the beginning, I like both the world of women and the world of men. But the world of women seems to me more redolent, more viscous, more caught up in mysteries than that of men. It is a world whose innermost parts are like delicate tracery and above all a world of stories with colorful illuminations. A world of long fingers with cabbalistic rings, bodies and minds that smell of oven-baked apple. Such an aroma is indecipherable and for this reason dwells far away over the seas and lands, encircling our world in a ruby-colored halo. As for Haritina, when I recall the second diamantine woman in my life, my parole will always be “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” In her honor, I sometimes braid my hair in dozens of pigtails and wear on my left ankle the strange bracelet made from an aluminum fork.
TRANSLATED BY ALISTAIR IAN BLYTH
[RUSSIA]
LIZA ALEXANDROVA-ZORINA
Bad Town
THE TOWN WAS NO BIGGER than a thumbnail, and the deserted villages huddled up to it like little children to their mother. Across the river the church domes glittered, and there were cattle grazing. A metal container stood in the middle of the field, which was bare apart from a single birch tree, sticking out like a splinter. From the riverbank one could see the Tajik woman mixing flour and water, cooking flatbread on the fire while the man smoked, using his other hand to tr
y and drive away a swarm of midges. He was as thin as a stick, and his clothes hung off him, so that from a distance he could have been mistaken for a scarecrow. Tanned black by the sun and dressed in brightly colored clothes, the Tajik family seemed out of place in the dreary scene. They looked more like cuttings from a color magazine that some joker had stuck onto a picture of a typical Russian summer.
They herded the farmer’s cattle from early morning until late at night. Their boy’s voice could be heard ringing out across the field, bright like a bell. He had nicknames for all the cows, taken from overheard conversations and TV shows. As he cracked the whip against their backs he called out the names of American celebrities and the milkmaids from the farm.
“How can you tell them apart?” his mother laughed.
The houses looked like they were rooted to the ground. They were little bigger than sheds, but each one had a satellite dish sticking out from it like a cocked ear. A television blared from an open window, and the Tajiks pressed against the fence, listening closely.
“A black-assed man lives a black-assed life,” said the bald old man, scowling as he watched them.
In Russia, the Tajiks christened themselves with Russian names, Sveta and Kolya. They laughed when they said their real names—the Russians couldn’t pronounce them. The boy wanted to keep his name, Zafar, and he would say it through clenched teeth, staring at the ground. But at the farm they turned it into the more familiar Russian name, Zakhar. The villagers didn’t like new words, and they still called the new farm the kolkhoz, Soviet style.
On payday Sveta shifted impatiently from foot to foot at the door of the accounts office, her gold teeth flashing and a feeble smile sliding across her exhausted features like a solitary cat. “Please, just a hun-dred rub-les, we’ve got no-thing to eat,” she said, breaking the words into pieces as if she was tearing flatbread. The accountant dismissed her without raising her head, and the guard pushed her out into the street.
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